


your hand in my hand framed on the living room mantle (I Am That Which I Say I Am)

by henryclerval



Series: I Am [1]
Category: Almost Human
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, M/M, Robots, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 02:55:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henryclerval/pseuds/henryclerval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're essentially dead and he is here, in his room deemed apartment, watching his internal clock tick minutes and seconds and lifetimes away until the sun rises and he may be distracted by the world again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your hand in my hand framed on the living room mantle (I Am That Which I Say I Am)

He is alone, perpetually and incredibly alone. 

What comes from it is not loneliness or a hollow echo in his chest but a terror that sinks in to every synapse and node that dot his body. Sparks it. Singes it. He feels the pulses be translated into horror and as he sits in the government-provided apartment of two chairs and an electrical outlet the terror speaks. Dorian hears it in the dark corners of his spine and where the wallpaper curls up old, frayed, forgotten on the baseboard. Snaking itself up the nooks of cracked spackle and up onto the walls--those bare, unkempt walls that he's thought of putting pictures upon. 

Of who or what has made him sit. He has no one, no loved ones that he can remember with pictures; no trinkets that remind him of friends and family; and, perhaps most painfully of all, nothing that has been gifted to him. No one has seen something that reminded them of him. He is alone and it is solidified by the fact that he is not thought about--not in the moment, not before, and certainly not after the fact. 

Dorian sits and thinks this through in all its crushing glory. He thinks of fleeting acquaintanceships and the long stares of women and men who do not understand, his distant cousins that line the walls with their blank looks that cause his skin to crawl, and he wonders if this isolation makes him more or less human. Perhaps because he's too much of one thing, too much of what they ought to be, that they cannot accept him. 

With an act as simple as existing he manages to ostracize himself from humans and androids. He is neither human nor fully robotic. The closest things to brothers that he has are better described as clones and they, too, hang cold and dead-eyed--a warning to men who wish to play God--in the far corner of a dirty laboratory. They have no time or capacity to think of Dorian, to see a poorly constructed knick-knack in a souvenir shop and buy it solely with him in mind. 

They're essentially dead and he is here, in his room deemed apartment, watching his internal clock tick minutes and seconds and lifetimes away until the sun rises and he may be distracted by the world again. 

If he could breathe he would sigh. He'd feel the air cold on his lips, scratch in his throat, and down in his lungs. Instead Dorian opens his mouth and pretends, feels the rush of air that he tries to gulp in before puffing it uselessly out again. He wonders what it must be like to be out of breath, to be full of it, to take loud and desperate gulps to the point of pain. Reading about lungs burning from lack of air isn't enough; this isn't a thing he ought to be desperate to experience yet here he is, memorizing each square inch of crusted wallpaper as he daydreams of air being ripped from him, being surprised from him. 

The soft growls of his CPU at work soften the silence of his cell. Home. The home with peeling walls and one grimy window that refuses to open properly. The home with no mantle, a bed that he had been forced to request an embarrassing amount of times, and two chairs. The home with a chill that he cannot feel but stains the window that is as stuck as he is. In the early morning he watches the frost grow in crooked patterns and tries to discern faces from it--tries to see the humans in shapes that his coworkers in all their humanity are so quick to spot. He sees lines and squares and poorly formed circles. He watches the frost lengthen and mutate and what seems to be an eyebrow sprouts into a tree, and what he had hoped would form an eye remains purely oval. That which had a promise of a face, a jawline, nose and ears and a rough patch of stubble and freckles never fully bloom. 

In his hopes of familiarity, Dorian convinces himself that they are faces. Convinces himself that it genuinely is, will be, and continue to be. The swell of something--softer than terror, dangerously quieter than horror--urges him to his feet, and over to where the faint heat of his processors fogs up the window. He pauses. Touches his finger to the pane and with deft movements, fills in the lines: unkempt hair, neck, shoulders, wrinkles and frown. He doesn't dare to stop to consider what he's doing for fear of shame, and when his finger does finally slow the swell in his throat multiplies. 

There are no pictures that hang on the decrepit walls that enclose him. Nothing gives away that he spends a portion of his daily life in the room. But it seems more bearable, almost, with his makeshift portrait. 


End file.
